.tv Site Designers or TV Programmers ?

[eyedomainous]

"pretty typical domainer type site with some youtube videos"​

Statements like this are pretty typical about TV domainer site design and "development" efforts.

"What is novel about youtube videos on a site (every second .tv domainer tries this and calls it development). If this has never been done in the hotel industry before then I would question still whether it is of any significance. ... I personally doubt this is going to take off, time will be the ultimate arbitrator of that though."​

The repetitive nature and dismissive tone from a growing choir of peers, singing the same refrain, must be discouraging to those who seek to build. Who dare develop... and show their hand.

The way I see it... a "typical domainer" is a 'print format' page designer. A true TV domainer is a TV programmer.

Peer pressure from typical domainers has many TV domainers thinking their sites must fit-in with 'the norm'.

Evidence of this can be seen in the 'What CMS Do You Use Thread', where most TV domainers state they use WORD PRESS.

Wordpress is, by definition and design, a Print Format software program -with a few hacked video mutations.

TV sites will never achieve a distinctive brand presence, nor deliver a distinctive user experience, with print format page design mimics.

Afterall, how many TV station sets are designed to look like newspaper layouts?

Also, take a look a the Google TV page layout. Now THAT's a TV format! Made for TV viewing.

Of course, when it comes to "lean back" TV viewing... the web aint there just yet so I try to offer a combination of print and TV elements in my site designs.

Which brings me back to the above quotes, made by snoop -in this thread, back in March, where I 'showed my hand' on TV site I developed that feeds YouTube videos into a hotel channel.

Recently I learned that the leading provider of "in-room" hotel TV programming, LogeNet --that "provides service to over 10,000 hotels, nearly 2 million rooms, reaching half a billion travelers a year", launched their own "YouTube'esq" video feed channel, DoNotDisturb.TV.

Though they claim its "the first", they know it is not as my L.A. FieldGuideTV hotel channel was launched (on the Sheraton's Logenet in-room TV network) four months prior to a LogeNet subsidiary, The Hotel Network, set out a press release introducing DoNotDisturb.TV.

So in the end the "unimpressive" site design didn't matter. The TV programming, and TV delivery format... "to service a need" did.

And, I guess those YouTube videos have some value after all. The Hotel Network reports the channel already accounts for nearly 20% of their viewing and out performs several of the Premier Cable channels.

 

[garptrader]

I'm still a newbie at development but I feel much more comfortable with the process than a year to 15 months ago. And every several weeks I will learn another tidbit about design, SEO, features within my CMS package, etc. I did not previously know. Over time that adds up. Just last month I sold a two-word alt TLD domain for $3000 which I would never have priced at that level and almost certainly would not have sold were it not for the fact that I had a website on that domain. I had managed over a year's time to get the site to rank on page one of Google (near the bottom). Funny thing is it had no photos other than in the header but it was loaded with dozens of relevant Youtube videos. After I lost my old site I relaunched the site on another domain.

I have one Spanish .TV site which just broke 2000 monthly visitors recently - nothing that impressive for the development pros but progress for a newbie. Most of the traffic is due to photos on the site which rank high enough on Bing and Google image search to generate traffic.

A .TV geo site launched about six months ago is now approaching 1000 visitors monthly but it still doesn't rank well at Google for the primary keywords. Most of the traffic is due to searches for local attractions within the city which are less competitive to rank for. Adsense clicks average nearly $1 each but I plan to expand monetization beyond Adsense.

 

[freedom30]

Thanks, eye, for your timely and inspiring post(ditto, garpo).

When you read the negative posts that have been hawked as informed opinions and see that they haven't changed since the 20th century and still maintains it's inflexibilty despite the dramatic changes that have taken place and the dynamic progress of the extension this year, it is indeed hard to take those opinions with anything more than the proverbial "grain of salt".

As for any newbies that view the posts, fine. Heeding the words of the negative posters may be necessary for a Darwinistic form of "cleaning the gene pool", so to speak. Serious investors and speculators read all of the posts and what doesn't fit the 21st century model is summarily ignored.

No offense and nothing personal, but I do not take credence in someone who can't adjust their view to fit the progress and changes of this extension.

I'm still here, investing and enjoying .tv with my WordPress sites and actually getting something out of the experience. I am not here to try to please one person who is out of touch and still languishing in the 20th century. I just read his posts and judge them to see if they fit my opinions and agenda.

Anyway, thanks again for relating your experiences as they do shine a light of what is happening in the extension and of things to come. Have a great day and weekend!

 

[eyedomainous]

I'm still a newbie at development but I feel much more comfortable with the process than a year to 15 months ago. And every several weeks I will learn another tidbit about design, SEO, features within my CMS package, etc. I did not previously know. Over time that adds up. Just last month I sold a two-word alt TLD domain for $3000 which I would never have priced at that level and almost certainly would not have sold were it not for the fact that I had a website on that domain.

As they say... they didn't build Rome in a day.
Domainer site dev, like domaining itself, is not just for premium players. Thats why many of us were attracted to this game. You can buy an $8 name and sell it for $300. Or, you can do some dev on a site for a name and sell it for $3K.

I'm still here, investing and enjoying .tv with my WordPress sites and actually getting something out of the experience.

Wordpress is clearly a popular and useful tool. The price is right and admin just keeps getting better. I will likely use it at some point, for some sites, as it works well as a video blog format CMS.

The 'branding' point I was making refers to what I see as the 'TV Domainer Disconnect'... of pitching "The TV Experience", but delivering "the video experience".

There's a big difference between 'watching TV' and 'watching a video'.

 

[garptrader]

Just to illustrate how developmental progress takes time and is not the quick flip most domainers envision with domains, my Adsense earnings this month (still not a large figure but to illustrate growth trends) will exceed what I made my first nine months. Feb & Mar 2010 were about twice the avg month the latter part of 2009. Apr & May 2010 were about 75% higher than Feb & Mar averages. June 2010 was close to twice Apr & May. July 2010 had already exceeded June with about a week remaining. It takes time for a site to grow traffic and it just doesn't happen in a matter of weeks. Of course Adsense is only one source of monetization.

 

[equity78]

Great post Claude glad to see that your stuff is taking stride. You have always been one of the people to watch IMO when it comes to developing .tv and TV.com. Best of luck.

 

[eyedomainous]

Great post Claude glad to see that your stuff is taking stride. You have always been one of the people to watch IMO when it comes to developing .tv and TV.com. Best of luck.

Thanks Ray!
I'm gonna need a bit of luck for my stuff to fully take stride as players with deep pockets can just sit back and watch for ideas to hijack.

 

[equity78]

I think you will do fine Claude because you have a creative different way of doing things. It would be great to have more threads along the lines of what you post. Again IMO